Advent prepares us to celebrate Jesus’ birth, God becoming human and making a home among us. The Advent first readings brim with the joy of Israel’s homecoming from exile.
Homecomings are joyous events. A school homecoming gathers together classmates who scatter after graduation and reconnect and catch up on each others’ lives. Alumni get to see what’s new at the old school building and remember their fun together.
Family reunions or Christmas dinners also bring scattered family together. Cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents gather often at the family home. In these gatherings younger family members discover their roots.
Israel’s exile and return home shapes the people of God almost as much as the exodus, the escape from slavery in Egypt. In fact, the prophets whose words we read this Advent see the return from exile as a second exodus. The God who led the Hebrew slaves on a dry path through the sea to freedom opens a road home for the exiled Israelites through the wilderness 400 years later.
The exile begins in 587 B.C., when the Babylonians destroy the city of Jerusalem after a long siege. The Babylonians knock down the city walls and topple the Temple. The ruins become the haunt of jackals. The Babylonians force the most able-bodied laborers into exile a thousand miles away. They march them to their capital city — Babylon, the city of Baghdad today.
For nearly 50 years these Israelites live in exile — two generations. Many people made a new life doing metal crafts and interpreting for the Babylonians in government and business. Israelite children grew up who had never seen their homeland.
Israel’s religion might have died out in a foreign land. The priests in exile collected and wrote down the laws, stories, and traditions the people had passed down orally. These writings formed the Old Testament. The people who no longer had a temple gathered to listen to the scriptures.
In 540 B.C., the Persians, who came from the area that is Iran today, defeated the Babylonians. A prophet named Second Isaiah saw in this defeat God opening a way home from Babylon. Second Isaiah began to call the people in exile to get ready to return home and be a people again.
Second Isaiah’s prophetic words have become famous. “Prepare the way of the Lord,” he preached. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain made low” (Isaiah 40.3-5).
Nearly 600 years later when John the Baptist begins to preach, people hear an echo of Second Isaiah’s famous image of God leading the people home through the wilderness. In our time the musical Godspell begins with the same message in song: “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.”
Our first readings during Advent remember and celebrate Israel’s homecoming and their experience of God’s faithfulness to them as a people. This Sunday the prophet Baruch imagines Israel’s homecoming:
Arise, O Jerusalem,
stand upon the heights;
Look toward the east,
and see your children
gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God
has remembered them.
They went out from you on foot
led away by their enemies;
but God will bring them back….
For God has ordered
that every high mountain
and the everlasting hills
be made low
and the valleys filled up,
to make level ground,
so that Israel may walk
safely in the glory of God.
Baruch 5.5-7